"Proofiness" ; a creative Arts n Crafts of numbers

Lies, Damned Lies, And 'Proofiness'


- an excerpt :

-Our society is now awash in proofiness. Using a few powerful techniques, thousands of people are crafting mathematical falsehoods to get you to swallow untruths. Advertisers use these techniques to forge numbers to get you to buy their products. Bureaucrats fiddle with data to try to get you to reelect them. Pundits and prophets use phony math to get you to believe predictions that never seem to pan out. Businessmen use bogus numerical arguments to steal your money. Pollsters, pretending to listen to what you have to say, use proofiness to tell you what they want you to believe.

Sometimes, people use these techniques to try to convince you of frivolous and absurd things. Scientists and other have used proofiness to show that Olympic sprinters will one day break the sound barrier and that there’s a mathematical formula that determines who has the perfect butt. There’s no limit to how absurd proofiness can be.

At the same time, proofiness has extraordinarily serious consequences. It nullifies elections, crowning victors that are undeserving—both Republican and Democratic. Worse yet, it is used to fix the outcome of future elections; politicians and judges use bogus mathematical techniques to manipulate voting districts and undermine the Census that dictates which Americans are represented in Congress. Proofiness is largely responsible for the collapse of our economy—and for the great sucking sound as more than a trillion dollars vanishes from the Treasury. Prosecutors and justices use proofiness to acquit the guilty and convict the innocent—even to put people to death. In short, bad math is undermining our democracy.

When you learn to shovel proofiness out of the way, some of the most controversial topics become simple and straightforward. For example, the question of who actually won the 2000 presidential election becomes crystal clear. (The surprising answer is the one that almost nobody would have been willing to accept: not Bush, not Gore, and almost none of the people who voted for either candidate.) Understand proofiness, and you can uncover many, many truths that had been obscured by a haze of lies.

LINK- - -
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129972868